Read an interesting post on Design Thinking in Schools.
It begins:
A few years ago I interviewed a group of high school students who had just taken a semester-long “Introduction to Design Thinking” course. In the class, they did a series of projects with increasing complexity in order to learn the process of design. I asked Andrew, a freshman, to name his favorite project from the class. Without pause, he answered, the first one — designing a name badge for someone else.
I was surprised to hear Andrew’s response, as I tend to think big in terms of the potential for design thinking. I believe that design can help address the world’s greatest challenges, and frankly, I wasn’t quite sure why the teacher had opted to include something as seemingly mundane as designing a name badge. Intrigued, I asked Andrew to tell me some of the reasons he liked that project so much.
Until that project, Andrew explained, he had never realized that he could create something that would make someone else happy. He expressed how good it felt to realize that creating something of value for someone else was within his ability.